Chapter 42
Elle
Inap on and off for most of the afternoon. Josh stays the whole time. One time when I wake up, he’s asleep, those killer lashes brushing his cheeks. The next time, he’s reading. And when I’ve finally decided I’ve had enough sleep, the shadows in my room are long. Josh is still there.
I brave a trip to the loo and wave off his offer of help.
I’m still bleeding a tiny bit and with my bowels in the state they’re in, I have no interest in letting him too close to my bathroom.
I splash my face and brush my teeth. I could use a change of scene, especially if I want to sleep well later, so Josh carries me and my pillow downstairs (despite my protestations) and settles me on the sofa before going to find Adela and ask her to heat up more broth.
There’s been a shift since he came to the hospital. He knows my deepest secret. He’s seen me wiped out and tubed up in hospital and he didn’t bat an eyelid. And since we got back here, there’s been this quiet ease between us. Like he doesn’t expect anything from me. He’s simply here if I need him.
And I don’t necessarily need him here, but I want him here.
There’s a thought circling in my mind. It’s been there since I woke up, and it won’t leave me alone. Maybe it’s because Josh has finally seen me in a state I’ve always been desperate to hide from him, and I feel like I’ve got nothing else to lose. The thought is this:
Ask Josh why he left you.
It’s driving me insane. Don’t get me wrong, that question has driven me insane for five years, but I had to make peace with not knowing a long time ago. The answer I settled for then was that he was a dick.
Really, there’s no other conclusion to be drawn, is there?
But despite my hissy fit the other morning, and my outrage that he’d try to brush off the gravity of what he did to me, I can’t square my ‘dick’ explanation with the guy I’ve got to know.
The guy who’s been doing a very good job of acting like he cares.
The guy who’s settled himself at the end of my sofa and is currently giving me a seriously blissful foot rub.
I cradle my mug of bone broth in my hands and blow gently on it to cool it down.
‘Josh.’
He looks up.
‘Why did you dump me?’
God. Just saying the words makes the emotion build in my chest, makes my chin quiver.
Pathetic. I don’t ask him why he dumped me on Twitter—I’m less interested in the how than the why.
But the fact that I’ve just been hospitalised because I let myself get so wound up over him, and the fact that he knows, makes me think I have nothing to lose.
I’m already an open book where Josh Lander is concerned.
He stares at me searchingly while his blessed thumb kneads my arch.
‘You sure you feel up to talking about this? I mean, I’m happy to talk about it. I’ve wanted to for a while now. But you’ve been through a lot, baby. I don’t wanna upset you.’
‘I can take it. I meant what I said the other morning. When you talked about not “letting me go”, I wanted to punch you. I won’t let you rewrite history, so I suppose that means I need you to give me the truth.’
He clears his throat. ‘Okay. I can see where you’re coming from.
But before I attempt to explain myself, I need you to know one thing, baby.
Whew.’ He runs his hand through his hair a couple of times.
‘I was in love with you then, when I… broke things off between us, and I’m in love with you now.
I’ve never stopped being in love with you, and I can prove it. ’
I stare at him. I was not expecting the L word, and I don’t know whether to be gob smacked or ecstatic or furious. I think I’m a bit of all three. Before I can react, he continues speaking.
‘I wanted to tell you I loved you on the Fourth of July weekend. I wish I’d gotten to tell you, but I know it would have made things worse in the end, so…’
I wanted to tell him I loved him that weekend too, and it’s always been a huge source of relief that I didn’t. I kept that back, even though I came so close to saying the words. And God knows, he didn’t deserve to hear them. It would have killed me, knowing I’d given him that piece of me.
Shit. He’s fucking with my head now. I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose in an attempt to ward off the tears I know are imminent, and he leans over and gently takes the mug off me, putting it on the coffee table.
‘Elle.’ He lifts my legs and scoots further up the sofa so he’s sitting under my knees and can take my hand properly. ‘Baby. However badly you think of me, and I deserve all the bad thoughts, know this. I was a man desperately in love. Always have been. And everything I did, I did loving you.’
God. This is even worse than thinking he didn’t care.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information.
I was happy with my decision to think of him as a spineless, entitled sociopath.
My brain hurts with the effort of trying to retrofit this new information into a narrative I’ve trodden so faithfully over the years.
‘You’d better have a fucking good explanation, Joshua,’ I say through gritted teeth.
He continues his magic work on my foot as his other hand strokes down my fingers.
‘I don’t know if it’s a good explanation, but all I can say is, I did it for you.
I did it to set you free from me. I was so fucked up, and I knew unless I finished it in the most cruel and fucking disrespectful way, you wouldn’t walk.
I could tell. You have so much integrity.
And I could see you had feelings for me, too. ’
‘Did you know you were going to do it when I was out there at your parents’ place? Were you laughing at me the whole time, or was it a stupid tweet you sent when you were high?’
‘No. It was neither. I was on cloud fucking nine that weekend—I was crazy in love with you. I couldn’t believe the most beautiful, smart, amazing woman I’d ever met was into me.
I couldn’t believe you didn’t see through me, to the extent I wondered if it was the fame thing you were into, and not the real me.
’ He holds up a hand when I go to interrupt.
‘But I know it wasn’t the fame, because that’s not you.
Anyways, I knew you weren’t seeing the whole picture. ’
‘The drugs?’ I whisper.
He nods. ‘Yeah. I kept that side of me well hidden around you.’ A pause. ‘Kind of like you kept your illness hidden from me. Sounds like we both made a call not to show those uglier sides of ourselves to each other.’
That gives me pause. I’d never thought of it like that, but since that tense conversation with Josh about NA in my hotel room, I’ve wondered a lot about why he didn’t tell me, and how I never noticed any substance issues when I was with him.
I’m not about to let him off—nowhere near—but I can appreciate the parallel.
‘Yeah, but I didn’t dump you because I was afraid you’d find out I poo my pants occasionally,’ I remind him.
‘Baby—Jesus. That’s not why I sent that tweet. I sent it because you didn’t know who you were involved with. You didn’t know you were falling for this sad fuck with all these addiction problems, who’d just drag you down with him right when you were about to go fucking stratospheric.’
I wipe my hand over my forehead.
‘Hang on. You’re telling me you broke up with me to set me free?’ The pitch of my voice rises. ‘Did you ever think about doing me the decency of consulting me? You said you loved me—you gave up on me, on us, just like that?’
‘No, baby. I gave up on me. I need to explain. After you went home, I had a bad few days. Brandon and I got really high—’
‘Fucking Brandon.’
‘Seriously. I haven’t spoken to him since that trip. I cut him off.’
‘You cut a lot of people off, didn’t you? Those who did deserve it and those who didn’t?’
‘I deserve that. Actually, my mom made me cut him off.’
‘Oh, and I suppose she told you to dump me, too?’
A pause.
‘Seriously?’ I’m icy cold now. ‘I suggest you tell me exactly what happened, Josh. Because none of this is making any sense, and it’s definitely not selling your case to me. And if you tell me you finished it because your mum told you to, I’m going to lose the fucking plot.’
‘Okay.’ He sighs. ‘So we had a rough few days, Brandon and me. We partied hard, and one night, I threw up, like, everywhere. Mom was fucking disgusted. I mean, it was seriously uncool of us. She kicked Brandon out the next morning and sent him home. And then she dragged me outside and told me I couldn’t go on like this anymore, that I was ruining what was left of my career, and that the best thing I could do for myself was check into rehab for a while.
‘She told me I hadn’t gotten considered for an exciting project in a while, that no one wanted to touch me because I had a reputation for being so unpredictable.
Pathetic, she called me. She said you were about to go stellar—she was really fucking obsessed with you—and you were in a different league from me.
That the only decent thing was for me to cut you loose and let you focus on your career.
‘She said you’d probably come to your senses and dump me soon, anyways.
I said there was no way, that I was in love with you and I was pretty sure you were falling in love with me too, and she said if I loved you, I should consider how damaging it would be to you, being linked with me as you got more successful and I got more sick.
Well, she didn’t call it sick, obviously, because the woman has zero compassion, but that’s what I was.
She said I’d drag you down, be an embarrassment.
‘And I knew she was right, about you, and about me. She’s a total bitch, but she’s a good manager. It wasn’t a hard sell—I was so fucking filled with self-loathing and disgust, and you were the one perfect thing in my life. I didn’t deserve you, so I asked her what she suggested.’